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Milon's Secret Castle (Any %) (Single Segment)

Verifier Responses

Quote from PJ:
I'll begin by saying this is PJ.

Milon's Secret Castle is an incredibly hard game to speed run.  I had never played this game until this year, but I found a copy locally for $3.25 so I decided to give it a whirl.  I love this game.  Despite it's reputation, it's actually a really fun game to play.  So, naturally, I tried to run it.  I immediately regretted this decision.  The randomness of the bosses is crippling.  There is just no way around it.  Sometimes you get an unwinnable pattern and just lose.  Other times you just get zoned forever and take like 2 minutes to kill the boss.  Healing is extremely limited in this game and later bosses do loads of damage, so you're basically left to either farm for a million years to recover health, farm for money to buy health refills, or just don't get hit by bosses.  Then, at the very end of the game, the true final boss is in one of four rooms and there is no indication of which is the true boss.  So yea, I pretty quickly realized this would be impossible to run.

...until Havoc showed up!

His comments pretty accurately describe what is going on in this run.  He lists all the mistakes and room for improvement, and the discoveries that made this run possible (manipulating final boss location!!).  I seriously never thought I'd see the day that a run of this got submitted, especially one that beats the best nico time!  His route is really smart and he has exceptionally good boss fights.  The escape from the well could be done faster in theory (as he mentions), but it is ridiculously hard/risky to kill the balloon enemies in the fire room.  His plan of escaping to the well to kill one is honestly probably faster than trying to kill one in the fire chamber.  Really the route overall is just really well planned.  All the umbrella drops are planned, the farming he does for triple umbrella is very very justified because these later bosses are stupidly hard, his health refills and money route are really smart, and he got strong luck.  This is a phenomenal run.

So yea.  Very accept.  Can't believe he's going to try for an improvement.


Quote from ktwo:
This is ktwo.
Quote from PJ:
Milon's Secret Castle is an incredibly hard game to speed run.  I had never played this game until this year, but I found a copy locally for $3.25 so I decided to give it a whirl.  I love this game.  Despite it's reputation, it's actually a really fun game to play.  So, naturally, I tried to run it.  I immediately regretted this decision.  The randomness of the bosses is crippling.  There is just no way around it.  Sometimes you get an unwinnable pattern and just lose.  Other times you just get zoned forever and take like 2 minutes to kill the boss.  Healing is extremely limited in this game and later bosses do loads of damage, so you're basically left to either farm for a million years to recover health, farm for money to buy health refills, or just don't get hit by bosses.  Then, at the very end of the game, the true final boss is in one of four rooms and there is no indication of which is the true boss.  So yea, I pretty quickly realized this would be impossible to run..
I could literally have written the same, word by word, myself (not sure I got my copy for 3.25 though, but nevermind!).

A/V - Good
Legit - Yes

Gameplay - As already has been said, this is one hardcore game to speedrun. It's random, non-linear, the movement is not evident to optimize and the bosses are incredibly powerful (don't get fooled by their cartoonish appearance!). The execution is really tight throughout the run and the runner clearly kicks ass at this game.
As for the route, the runner played this as kind of a "solo project" and did not show any videos of the route. While there is a certain appeal to just bring forward the finished product, there is also the risk of overlooking something that another pair of eyes could have pointed out. I must say that I'm overall impressed by the route though.
I can see three major changes that could have cut roughly half a minute if done well. The first would have been to learn how to spawn Maharito (the last boss) in the green room. It's dependent on when you press start on the title screen and I think it should be possible to learn how to manipulate it (although I have admittedly not tested it myself). The second one is to go for a more aggressive tactic when escaping the well. It's very luck-dependent though, because it depends on where the enemies spawn. The third is to skip healing before the skeleton boss. However, I remember the skeleton boss being a major pain even with all health upgrades, the best weapon and all aid items, so trading a few seconds to improve the odds is by no means shocking.
I have not gone over this run with a comb to see if I could find any minor improvements to the route. If anyone is crazy enough to work on an improvement, I'd probably be more willing to do so though. Anyways, I still found two things that looked slightly odd in my eyes. At 6:43, there was some trouble breaking the wall by jumping and shooting. I think that can be done in an easier way. At 7:05, I didn't understand why the runner chose to shrink (and there was no mention in the comments either why they took that option).

Overall - This is a very impressive speedrun. The nature of the game makes it impossible to fully optimize, both in terms of the route and the execution. There might a few minor things to improve, but further improvements from this point will basically rely on getting better general luck and/or adding very risky/luck-based strats.

ACCEPT


Quote from RedArremer:
Since everyone's revealing their identity, I'm Red Arremer (not that it matters lol).

Easy accept, this is a marvelous run. There's some minor flubs I've noticed that aren't tied to boss RNG, but the runner pointed most of them out, and this is still a very impressive run worth to be on SDA.


Decision: Accept

Congratulations to 'HavocProdigy!'
Thread title:  
Edit history:
HavocProdigy: 2013-09-13 09:41:07 pm
Sweet.  Thank-you PJ, ktwo, and RedArremer.  I also really appreciate how quickly you all sent in your comments for this.  I imagine it's frustrating to have a run held up by a verifier taking a long time to send in their response.

To keep this short, I'll just address the 2 moments which ktwo addressed in the run.

6:34 - I don't really have any in-depth explanation for what happened at 6:43 except to say that I missed the wall with my shot.  I doubt I even lost 2 seconds.

7:05 - I shrink at this part in order to make Milon harder to hit for the flame enemy which comes out of the fireplace.  I had an unusually good pattern in this run.  Normally, he will spam you with shots while you push the block.  However, he pretty much just left me alone in this run.  Also, the glove is along the way in this level and wastes at most 1 second (but only because you cannot fire bubbles until he has finished shrinking).  Shrinking Milon in 1/2 makes him harder to hit.  This same reasoning applies for the Maharito fight.  Tackling him with a fully-sized Milon is not advisable.

I haven't come close to 10:43 since this run but to be fair, I've moved on to (or rather, back to) another game for NES that I was running well before Milon.  I'll come back to Milon in the near future.  Thanks again, everyone.

EDIT:  I almost forgot...I happened to watch your whole Super Ghouls n' Ghosts run on Twitch yesterday, PJ.  Great run!  That was entertaining to watch.
Again, sick run. Congrats.

Quote from HavocProdigy:
6:34 - I don't really have any in-depth explanation for what happened at 6:43 except to say that I missed the wall with my shot.  I doubt I even lost 2 seconds.
I suggest breaking the blocks while waiting for the crown to spawn. You can do it pretty easily without losing any time.

Quote from HavocProdigy:
7:05 - I shrink at this part in order to make Milon harder to hit for the flame enemy which comes out of the fireplace.  I had an unusually good pattern in this run.  Normally, he will spam you with shots while you push the block.  However, he pretty much just left me alone in this run.  Also, the glove is along the way in this level and wastes at most 1 second (but only because you cannot fire bubbles until he has finished shrinking).  Shrinking Milon in 1/2 makes him harder to hit.  This same reasoning applies for the Maharito fight.  Tackling him with a fully-sized Milon is not advisable.
I remember now what kind of troll that flame enemy is. So yes, I understand better now why it's worth spending a second to shrink. However, I decided to play around with that section a bit and came up with few other comments. First of all, a trick I'm not sure you're familiar with. The bees move in the direction Milon is facing when spawning. What you can do here is to fire and then quickly turn to the right before the bee has appeared. That way you don't have to chase after it. Second, is there a reason for going right once you drop (through the opening you need to be small for)? It's half a second faster to go the left and no risk involved. Or did you specifically want to shoot that extra enemy for an upcoming umbrella or something?
Thanks.

-Yes, the blocks are breakable while waiting for the crown to appear.  Normally, I can break those two blocks in one fluid motion while leaving.  I just happened to lose 1 second on it this time.  I can live with that.

-I use the bee trick that you're referring to in the Right Tower.  I "chased" the bee in level 3-2 for less than a full second.

-I'm not quite sure what part you're referring to at the end of your post.
The attached image shows where you went to the right, but it's half a second faster to go to the left.

Attachment:
I go that way to kill the extra enemy (shown in your posted image) in case I'm off on my counter by 1 or 2.  If I don't get an umbrella by the time I get to the fireplace, the run is basically over.  Fighting the boss with double shot rather than triple shot wastes quite a bit of time in addition to making the fight a lot riskier.  I'd much rather lose an apparent half of a second than risk throwing away an entire run because I did not kill enough enemies to spawn an umbrella.  I think that that's worth far more than the precious 0.5 seconds.
Is PJ
Agreed with Havoc.
Arbitrary forum emu
I'm sad that I didn't hop on the verification for this in time. REALLY excited to see the final run!

Congratulations on getting this, and fantastic work getting a time this low.
Thanks, Boxfat.  While I was doing research for this game, I watched your stream of when you were planning a route for this game.  On an unrelated note, I've enviously watched you run Faxanadu on a couple of occasions in the past while trying to figure out why I'm so inept at the game.  I still haven't figured out why I'm so terrible at that game but I enjoy watching runs of it.
Edit history:
presjpolk: 2013-09-16 07:05:53 am
presjpolk: 2013-09-16 07:05:34 am
HELLO!
What do you have trouble with?  One big thing to remember about Faxanadu is that the physics are very unforgiving.  Momentum is slow to get (especially at the low levels you're at in the speed run), and it's very important to manage when doing jumps.

Another thing is just to learn certain strats to make quick kills without getitng hit. The shiner strike (the mid-air attack and magic combo we use to kill the jumping guys early), stuff like that.

I'd also suggest carrying red potions early on as you learn the game. There's a red potion you can spawn in the room you use the mattock in, and you can buy potions after the Black Onyx death, and after the Battle Suit death.  You can also carry an extra pair of boots so that at the endgame, you don't have to stretch the Dartmoor boots and ointment to the Evil One. You can use a fresh pair in the Evil One's fortress, and get the ointment below the Evil One.  These things do cost modest amounts of time but it'll get you comfortable doing full runs, and you can gradually remove the crutches.